living in Thailand

Here’s How You Can Invest in a Woman’s Future.

They come to my door sometimes, always unannounced, and always with some inexpensive sugary drink or snack to give to me, the hostess, as is proper Asian custom. A blurry photo I snapped during one of those visits. We sit down, usually on the floor. They’re more comfortable there. I […]

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On Not Taking Things For Granted

We play a little thought game sometimes, my husband and I. It’s simple really. We take what we know about the people we meet, and we speculate on what their life would have been like if they had been able to access the same resources we had when we were […]

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Camping out in the Pink Palace

I wrote this a year ago, when we first moved into this house, and never hit publish. I was trying to take a video tour to add to the post so you could see what I was talking about, but it didn’t turn out well, and so I was going […]

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Holding The Pieces

I sat on a pile of concrete fence posts across from her. She juggles her baby, almost a year old now, she says. She doesn’t really know because the baby’s father has taken all of her birth records. I ask her to tell me how she came to be “married”. […]

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False Alarms and Energy Drinks

She hands me a little plastic bag through the driver window. “Ah Sayama, chesu tin ba deh.” (Teacher, thank you, in Burmese.) I let my surprise show on my face. Not over the drinks, the ladies have taken to giving me these little gratitude tokens every week, almost always an […]

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Small town livin’ – Village Life

Beema is here!!! For more than 2 weeks we are enjoying a visit from Aaron’s mom and we are loving it. She’s spoiling all of us. We’ve missed her so much since we left the US and it’s so good to see her again. Since I have a second to […]

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Please, No Photos

I probably shouldn’t have tried to go to the mall after art class yesterday. (Hooray, homeschool co-op has an art teacher now!) Dek was doing that early stages of fussy thing he does when he needs a nap, and I was already feeling that rising internal pressure that happens when […]

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One Year Reflections

Our one year anniversary in Thailand came and went more than a month ago. I think we were in the middle of hosting volunteers and dealing with gastro intestinal issues, something we do on a fairly regular basis living here, so we didn’t even mark the occasion until later. We’ve […]

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